As a college freshman I took a course called Engineering 1 from the great James Adams. James Adams is the author of Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas, one of the earliest books to integrate concepts from fields as diverse as psychology, art, business, engineering, and philosophy.
In that course, Professor Adams gave us an assignment: (1) think of something that “bugs” you; and (2) come up with a product or service that solves it. Perhaps because I was living then in sunny California and wasn’t working hard enough, my answer to (1) was: “When sunbathing, I’m bugged by having to constantly turn in order to face the sun as it moves across the sky.” My product idea in answer to (2) was: A chaise that rotates itself by clock drive, a motor similar to those used on many telescopes.
Thankfully, my business sense was better than my engineering one, because I never sought to have the product built. But I understood Professor Adams’s point. That all production seeks to free people of something that is “bugging” them, in the sense of bothering or troubling them, in the sense of meeting some unmet need. Sometimes people might not even realize that they have that need, until the product or service exists, at which point they can’t imagine living without it.
Of course, a given need might be profound (such as pertains to food or medicine) or hardly so (like sunbathing). But whichever need a given product or service meets, that is why it exists.
Be First to Comment